Lift Me Up With Gentle Hands
by Lassroyale
Summary: Casey has a moment and a revelation as Chuck's blood stains his palms.


John Casey's hands are large. His hands are strong, calloused and tough from a lifetime of use. His knuckles are perpetually swollen; the tips of his fingers smell like gunpowder. Casey's hands are made for brutality – for killing.

His hands bring death.

Death is written into the whorls of his skin, imprinted, as complex as computer code – automatic. His body reads the cipher with ease, years of training twitching muscle memory into lethal action without thought. His fingers know just how much pressure to apply to a man's windpipe to crush it. His palms welcome the feel of cold steel pressed against his lifeline. His arms anticipate the recoil of a .45 caliber Sig Sauer as it's fired. His ears are accustomed to report of gunfire, a type of discordant song that's more beautiful than any symphony of Beethoven's. It's an honest song – real – and each time he hears the sound of a gun discharging a note is struck within him.

There's a sense of finality in the chords, like an echo that fades into the corners of the mind. He identifies with it. It soothes him.

What John Casey's hands _don't_ know, however, are how to heal. They don't know how to fix things – rather, how to fix people. That sort of thing was best left to doctors and field medics who had the patience for setting broken bones and sewing skin back together in a patchwork of stitches and gauze. Casey doesn't know how to comfort; he doesn't know how to hold the torn edges of Chuck's body together.

He tries, however, and for the first time Casey's hands feel useless. They tremble once, betraying him – betraying the depth of his worry. He feels the warmth of Chuck's blood drain over his fingers and fill the lines of his skin. It stains his wrists. Casey's hands tremble again before he grits his teeth and forces rigid control back through his limbs.

Chuck doesn't notice. He barely knows Casey is there.

John Casey's hands are stained red. Chuck's skin is slick and raw, and Casey's green Buy More shirt is saturated with the crimson stain of his fading life. He holds Chuck closer, curling him to his chest instinctively - protectively - when Chuck gasps and shudders. Blind panic jerks Chuck's body violently like a marionette with tangled strings, and Casey doesn't know what to do - not really. So he finds himself muttering nothing to Chuck in a deep, soothing voice that he doesn't quite recognize as his own. It's too low, too soft, though there's a brittle tautness underlying his words that string the syllables together into identifiable speech.

Casey realizes he's telling Chuck to hold on for him. He's telling Chuck that he won't leave him - will never leave him - no matter what.

Chuck begins to quiet, though when his body slumps and becomes eerily still, Casey feels sudden panic rise up within him. Chuck is _too_ still, his face too slack, and Casey's fingers are stupid with nerves as he smooths down the bruised curve of Chuck's cheek. He trails his fingertips along Chuck's jaw and presses them firmly against his neck, holding his breath for a long, tense second before finally feeling his pulse thrum faintly beneath clammy skin.

"Hang in there, Bartowski," he mutters. The words are awkward on his tongue, thick and weighted with muted significance, almost as if they wanted to be something else. They do, they are; he wants. Casey starts to say something more, something meaningful perhaps, but he abandons the words halfway through. He swallows hard, swallowing around their shape (their significance) lodged heavily in his throat.

Chuck's eyelids flutter but don't open. Casey feels something wind tightly in his stomach as he lets his fingers drift over Chuck's numerous wounds for the umpteenth time. Fulcrum worked him over with the sort of exquisite care that Casey can't appreciate at that moment. Not when Chuck is as limp as a ragdoll in his arms, bleeding all over his clothes and staining them with no consideration. Not when the lifeless body of the man who'd tortured Chuck is lying a few feet away in a graceless heap, with a bullet between his eyes.

Death was too good for that man. For once, Casey felt no satisfaction in killing scum like him. He wishes he could have taken his time with that bastard after seeing what he'd done to Chuck. Despite himself, despite his training, Casey squeezes his eyes shut against the memory which threatens to surface. It's no matter; even if he can shut out the image of seeing Chuck strung up and beaten black and blue and flayed red and dripping, he will never forget the sound of him slowly bleeding out onto the cold concrete. _Drip. Drip. Drip._

The memory makes something surge red-hot and violent within him, and Casey has half a mind to go over and curb stomp the Fulcrum bastard's corpse. He shifts, hands tightening into fists as the anger sears through his veins like a flash flood, when a slight pressure on his forearm wholly absorbs his attention. Casey immediately glances down and sees that Chuck is looking up at him. One of Chuck's eyes is blackened and swollen shut, and his bottom lip is split painfully – cut with a razor.

"You came," Chuck gasps. His voice is weak, dry, and the words seem to free themselves from his throat with much effort.

Casey doesn't know what to say, so after a moment he replies, "I should've been here sooner."

Chuck draws a laborious breath deep into his lungs and doesn't say anything for a long moment; long enough that Casey thinks he might have passed out again. "I asked for you," Chuck murmurs after a while, just a soft rasp of sound that Casey almost can't make out. "I told 'em I'd unleash the Casey...told 'em they'd be sorry..."

"Shut up, Bartowski," Casey growls, afraid that Chuck is wasting his strength on things that he doesn't think he wants to hear. Things that might mean something to him. Things that _do_ mean something to him. Things he wants to hear...and yet knows he shouldn't.

Chuck opens his mouth again and Casey can read the protest in his one good eye. Casey stops him with a brush of his thumb along the sweep of his cheek, pausing briefly when he grazes the corner of Chuck's mouth. Chuck continues to stare up at him, the expression in his one good eye clouded with pain and inscrutable. Casey gently wipes away a the blood from the corner of Chuck's mouth; he frowns at the back of his hand, a deep 'v' creasing his brow when he continues to stroke his thumb soothingly along Chuck's jaw. "Not now, Intersect," he says, finally. "Save your strength. You'll be useless to me if you die here." Though his words are gruff, they're undercut by the affection he can't crush from his tone.

Chuck doesn't nod, doesn't say anything, but his drops his hand from Casey's forearm to his wrist before tangling their fingers together. Casey doesn't pull away even though every logical part of his mind tells him to break the contact - the connection. Instead, he holds Chuck's hand tightly within his own. He doesn't let go, even when Walker finds them moments later.

**-VVV-**

Later, there's business to take of. Namely, there are people to kill - people who need to pay for kidnapping and torturing John Casey's asset. There are not enough days in the year for what Casey wants to do to the people who tortured Chuck, but Fulcrum are like foxes gone to ground – no amount of barking down one of their holes will chase them out.

It's early morning by the time he makes his way to the hospital. He doesn't bring anything with him except for the weariness he feels roll down the length of his spine and a sort of dread that he's unused to, settled firmly in the pit of his stomach. Walker's not there when he enters and Casey's glad for the moment alone. It gives him time to gather his thoughts - his courage if he was being honest - and all too soon he finds himself standing by Chuck's bed. He sinks tiredly down into the chair pulled up to the bedside, and watches Chuck's eyes move behind his closed lids.

The room is a chorus of beeping monitors. Tubes seem to run in and out of Chuck's body with a kind of controlled chaos that only nurses could make heads or tails of. Casey doesn't know what he's searching for in Chuck's ashen face. What he does know, is that he wants tear the thick tube from Chuck's throat with unconstrained violence. Sure, he'd threatened to hurt the nerd before, but never was something different.

This was Chuck.

Casey's hands clench into fists, blunt nails digging crescent shapes into the thick skin of his palms. He shouldn't be here. He should be out, investigating how to make the people who did this to Chuck pay. It's what a good agent would be doing. It's what _he_ should be doing.

But Casey doesn't move; he can't move. He remembers howChuck teased him, telling Casey how much he really loved him. He remembers the eagerness in Chuck's voice whenever he thought Casey was opening up to him; the sincerity in his tone all at once disarming, charming, and utterly incredulous.

Casey pushes himself up. He couldn't be here. It was just too confusing. He turns to leave, intent on doing something simple - like tracking and killing members of Fulcrum - when there's a quiet noise behind him, like a quickly inhaled breath. He turns back towards the bed and feels something cross his face before he manages to close it off.

Chuck is awake, his one good eye trained wearily on him. He lifts a hand and Casey tries not to notice how feeble the action seems. "Casey." Chuck breathes out his name so quietly that Casey might have imagined it, if he hadn't seen the slight movement of Chuck's lips. He's drawn back towards the bed - towards Chuck - his jaw hard and teeth clenched so tightly together he thinks they might just shatter. Chuck's fingers twitch up further and reach out for him, and Casey, after a moment's hesitation, folds Chuck's hand within his own.

He doesn't say anything and Chuck doesn't seem to expect it. Instead, Chuck closes his eye again and releases a relieved breath. "Stay," he whispers.

Casey knows Chuck can't see his nod, but he collapses carefully back into the chair, nevertheless. He stares at his hand curved gently around Chuck's, a hand that kills; a hand that's been stained with too much blood to ever truly be clean. Chuck cracks open his eye once more and looks at him, the corners of his mouth rounding into a pleased smile around the breathing tube. Casey feels Chuck's fingers squeeze his own, and, after a moment of hesitation, he squeezes back, firmly and reassuringly. His breath catches in his throat as Chuck's smile widens a bit, before he closes his eye and relaxes back into the pillows.

Casey isn't used to being gentle - there's no peace to be found within him. But Chuck seems to gain some measure of comfort from his presence and so he stays and he watches and he holds Chuck's hand in his own. And maybe that can be enough.

At least for now.

(The End.)


End file.
